Night Music by Jojo Moyes Page A

twigs and branches. The air was damp and she blew into her scarf, enjoying the warmth that bounced back on to her skin. The woodland smelled of moss, damp wood and healthy decay, so unlike the sinister damp of the house, where she often found herself wondering what might be rotting away around them.
    A twig snapped and she stood very still, her city-bred mind fluttering with images of mad axemen. She held her breath and revolved slowly towards where the sound had come from.
    Some twenty feet away, a huge stag was staring at her, its head lifted, its licheny antlers resembling the unclad branches behind it. Thin streams of vapour puffed from its nostrils, and it blinked several times.
    Isabel was too entranced to be afraid. She stared at it, marvelling that such creatures could still exist in the wild, that in their built-up, overcrowded little country there was still room for such a beast to roam free. ‘Oh.’ Perhaps that small sound broke the spell, because the stag bounded into the open field and away.
    Isabel watched it go. A snatch of music entered her head: The Transformation of Acteon into a Stag . The animal slowed and hesitated, its head swinging round as her mind filled with the fanfare of arpeggios that opened the symphony, a symbol of the young men who had come hunting, the gentle flute Adagio that spoke of murmuring streams and breezes.
    Suddenly the silence was broken by a gunshot. The stag took off, stumbling across the claggy soil. Another shot rang out and Isabel, who had initially leaped behind a tree, now raced out into the open after the animal, trying to work out where the shooting was coming from.
    ‘Stop it!’ she yelled, her scarf falling away from her mouth. ‘Whoever you are! Stop shooting!’ Her heart was racing. She tried to run, but the earth had stuck in huge clods to her feet.
    ‘Stop!’ she shrieked, hoping the unseen hunter could hear her. She tried to push the mud off one boot with the toe of the other. The stag appeared to have got away, but her heart still thumped as she waited for the next shot.
    It was then that she saw the man striding across the field towards her, apparently unhampered by the mud. She saw his rifle, now cocked downwards towards the ground, resting in the crook of his arm.
    She pulled at her scarf, so that her mouth was free.
    ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ Shock had made her louder than she had intended.
    The man slowed as he reached her, his own face flushed as if he had not expected to be interrupted. He was probably not much older than her, but his height gave him authority and his dark hair was brutally shorn. His face had the winter colour of one who spent his time outdoors. contours whipped by the wind into precise planes.
    ‘I’m shooting. What do you think I’m doing?’ He seemed shocked to find her there.
    Isabel had managed to free her feet, but adrenalin still washed through her. ‘How dare you? What are you – a poacher?’
    ‘Poacher? Hah!’
    ‘I’ll call the police.’
    ‘And tell them what? That I was trying to scare away the deer from the new crops?’
    ‘I’ll tell them you’re trespassing on my land.’
    ‘This isn’t your land.’ His voice held a faint burr.
    ‘What makes you think that?’
    ‘It belongs to Matt McCarthy. All the way up to those trees. And I have his permission to clear it of anything I want.’
    As he spoke, it seemed to Isabel that he looked meaningfully at his gun. ‘Are you threatening me?’ she said.
    He followed her gaze, then glanced up at her, eyebrows raised. ‘ Threatening you?’
    ‘I don’t want guns so close to my house.’
    ‘I wasn’t pointing it anywhere near your house.’
    ‘My son comes out here. You could have hit him.’
    The man opened his mouth, then shook his head, turned on his heel and walked back across the field, shoulders hunched. His parting words floated to her: ‘Then you’re going to have to teach him where the boundaries are, aren’t you?’
    It